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Posts Tagged ‘UI pages’

Record hand-drawn user signatures with SNCGuru Signature Pad!

Thursday, 20 October, 2011 09:35 Written by Mark Stanger
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I‘ve seen a couple of requests recently for a capability to record actual, hand-drawn user signatures. There are probably several uses for this type of thing, but usually the requirement has something to do with a field service technician completing work in the field, and then being able to get a customer to sign indicating that some work was performed. This functionality doesn’t exist in ServiceNow, but it can be added thanks to a very cool jQuery plugin called ‘Signature Pad‘. I’ve incorporated this jQuery solution into a UI page/Dialog-based solution for use with regular ServiceNow records and forms. Read on for more information about the SNCGuru SignaturePad update set!

Signature Pad

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Creating a Live Feed Homepage Widget

Monday, 17 October, 2011 08:47 Written by Mark Stanger
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erviceNow Live Feed is a great new functionality that provides a place to post and share content in a ServiceNow instance. This content forms a searchable knowledge source for sharing information within an organization. I’ve had a request recently to make this feature accessible from a user homepage. This article explains how you can easily create a Live Feed homepage widget.
Live Feed Homepage Widget

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Login Terms and Conditions Dialog

Wednesday, 12 October, 2011 08:57 Written by Mark Stanger
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ServiceNow provides various methods for logging users into an instance. Local login, LDAP, SAML, and Digested Token are all used pretty regularly by customers. One thing that is often requested, but usually not successfully addressed, is the need to have the logged-in user accept some terms or conditions of use before they are allowed to use the system. The solutions attempted before usually suffered from a variety of issues ranging from overly-complex modification of one or more installation exits to being able to easily bypass the terms page entirely. In the end, these solutions seemed to be broken on some level. As we’ve seen requests for this type of functionality increase over the past few months, Jacob Andersen (who developed almost all of the integration and SSO information at SNCGuru) and I decided to collaborate to create a solution that actually works!

Login Terms Acceptance

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Creating a Knowledge Search Homepage Widget

Monday, 06 June, 2011 07:57 Written by Mark Stanger
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couple of weeks ago at Knowledge11 I presented a session on Advanced Incident Management. One of the topics discussed there was to help your users help themselves by finding solutions in a knowledge base. A simple way to make this more of a focus for your end users is to add a ‘Knowledge Search’ widget to the top of their homepage.
Even if you already have this functionality in your instance, this should serve as a good tutorial on adding any new custom homepage widget to your ServiceNow instance.

Knowledge Search Widget

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Handling Simultaneous Updates in Service-now

Wednesday, 12 January, 2011 08:47 Written by Mark Stanger
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It’s not uncommon in any application to have scenarios where multiple people might be working with a single record at the same time. This is certainly true with Service-now (particularly for records on Task tables). You may have experienced frustration while working with an incident record, making updates, and having some of those updates overwritten a few minutes later because somebody else had the record open at the same time and didn’t know about the changes you had made. Because of situations like this, there is often a need to provide some sort of record lock or alert capability that lets people know when other people are working with the same record.

In the past, you may have used the ‘Simultaneous Update Alert’ script from the Service-now wiki to provide this capability. While that solution works fine, and I’ve used it on almost every engagement I’ve been involved with since it became available, it’s pretty limited in the information it provides back to the end user. You just get a simple alert on record submission…no details, no available actions other than to go ahead and submit or cancel, etc.

I recently had a coworker recommend the use of a UI page to provide a little more flexibility to the messaging that comes with the simultaneous update alert on the wiki. I thought this was a great idea and I had some time over the New Year’s holiday so I started working on it. I’ve finally come up with a solution that I’m happy with and have posted it here in the SNCGuru downloads section as the ‘Simultaneous Update Alert’ update set.

Simultaneous Update Alert

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Creating a Custom Slushbucket Popup Dialog

Tuesday, 04 January, 2011 09:29 Written by Mark Stanger
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appy New Year! Hopefully everybody had a great holiday. Mine was spent mostly helping my kids to break in some new toys :) . I did get some time to play with some new Service-now ideas as well. I’ll be sharing some very cool stuff here on SNCGuru over the next couple of weeks.
I’ve seen a couple requests recently for a way to allow users to select items from a slushbucket popup dialog. The most common reason for this is to help manage manual group approvals on a task record. If you’ve worked with group approvals at all, you’ve probably noticed that they work a little bit differently than regular approval records do. Group approval records are really just task records so you can’t just hit an ‘Edit’ button and add groups to be approvers on a task. Instead, you have to repeatedly click the ‘New’ button and create a new task record for each approval group. Normally this isn’t an issue because group approvals are typically managed in workflow but if you’re manually adding a lot of these, the process can be fairly tedious.
This article shows how you can provide a better UI by creating a slushbucket popup dialog that allows users to select one or many groups to add as approvers on a task. Even though the solution is designed for a specific use case, I’ve tried to make the example shown here generic enough so that you can easily modify it for other uses as well.

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GlideDialogWindow – Terms and Conditions Acceptance Page

Monday, 11 October, 2010 07:02 Written by Mark Stanger
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ast week I had a request come in from a client where they wanted to require users to accept certain terms and conditions before ordering a specific catalog item. I have seen this type of request before, but I don’t think I’ve really seen an elegant solution to it…or anything that could really be called a solution at all :) . Usually you end up with some combination of a wizard, some custom form, and some crazy scripts that make no sense to anyone but the person who created it. Then I realized that I had just written about a solution a week or so ago when I wrote about how to create a UI Page popup using GlideDialogWindow! The specific application of the solution I wrote about was a little bit different, but the basic pieces were identical. By making some basic tweaks to a solution I already knew about, I was able to come up with what I think is a really nice way to require acceptance of some terms before a user orders a catalog item. This same method could also be used on other forms and tables in Service-now.com.

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GlideDialogWindow: Advanced Popups Using UI Pages

Thursday, 23 September, 2010 14:55 Written by Mark Stanger
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his article is the 3rd in a series of posts explaining the use of ‘GlideDialog’ in Service-now. If you want to see all of the articles I’ve written about GlideDialogWindow and popups in Service-now just use the tags at the bottom of this article.

In this article I’ll show you how you can use GlideDialogWindow to pop open a dialog containing any custom UI Page information you want. I’ll also show how you can pass information into those dialogs, and how you can return information from those dialogs back to the standard form that initiated the dialog. These dialogs can be initiated from any place where you can use client scripts…client scripts, UI Macros, UI Actions, etc.

The only warning I’ll give here is this: While it’s very easy to pop open a dialog window using this method, the real work happens in the UI Page contained in the dialog. The purpose of this post is not to explain the complexities of creating your own UI Pages in Service-now. Until I get a chance to write about those, the best recommendation I can give you would be to take a look at the UI Pages you’ll find out-of-box in your system.

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GlideDialogWindow: QuickForms

Thursday, 16 September, 2010 11:06 Written by Mark Stanger
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couple of days ago I wrote about some cool ways that you can show system list information in GlideDialogWindow popups from a form. As promised, here’s another article showing some other ways that you can use GlideDialogWindow. If you want to see all of the articles I’ve written about GlideDialogWindow and popups in Service-now just use the tags at the bottom of this article.

In this article I’ll show you how you can use GlideDialogWindow to update records from a list with a multiple update or a form with an update or insert on a single record anywhere in the system.

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How to Create a Custom Global Search Page

Thursday, 18 February, 2010 08:26 Written by Mark Stanger
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year or so ago Service-now didn’t have any real global search capability. You could search or filter within a table list, or you could search the knowledge base like you can now. Everybody wanted global search though. In response to this demand I created a modification to the knowledge search that searched and displayed task records along with knowledge search results. Eventually, development came up with an even better solution that allows us to search globally like we do today.

Now that we can search globally in an instance people are asking us to limit the results again in certain situations. While this modification is not for everyone, it does show a very non-intrusive method for creating separate search pages to limit the search scope on that particular search page to exactly what you want.

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Latest Comments

  • Jim Coyne: I’m not sure exactly what you are looking for, but can you use “window.location” in your...
  • Ian: Might want to check the single quotes around ITIL in the condition line, they gave an error for me until I...
  • Mark Stanger: That’s correct. This returns instance URLs. I don’t have an equivalent currently that...
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